Base 10 Partners led a $30 million pre-Series B funding round for the Nigerian payment service provider Nomba. The other investors in this round are Helios Digital Ventures, Shopify, Partech, and Khosla Ventures.
Nomba was started in 2016. Its first version, Kudi, was a chatbot that answered financial questions and let people send money, buy airtime, and pay bills. But it quickly changed to offer agency banking services. Last year, it changed its name from Kudi to Nomba and added services like payments and business banking for its users.
Now that it serves more than 300,000 businesses and handles $1 billion in transactions every month, the startup wants to offer its customers more services, such as invoicing and order management.
With the new money, the new company says it wants to offer more services to businesses in Nigeria and all over Africa.
The CEO of the startup, Yinka Adewale, said, “We see payment as a business model, not just a product, and we want to make it easier for businesses to use everything they can in their payment processes to help them keep growing and succeeding. We have been working on a long list of products, and the investors who have backed us and the money we have raised give us a lot of confidence in what can be done when business owners have better payment options.”
Nomba competes with startups in the payments, business banking, and bookkeeping verticals because it offers a wide range of services. For example, it helps businesses make and send invoices, and customers can use their phones to look at a restaurant’s menu and place orders. This is because more and more businesses are building banking solutions for Nigeria’s small and medium-sized businesses, which have usually had trouble getting easy access to banking services. After years of providing agency banking services, Moniepoint became a business banking provider in 2022. It joined Brass and Prospa in this field.
Luci Fonseca, Partner at Base10 said, “Nomba’s track record of innovation and capital efficiency makes it one of the most exciting startups in Africa. We are thrilled to be supporting them to deliver their game-changing solutions to power growth and continued success for businesses in Nigeria and beyond.”
